My introduction to Video Violence.

It was the early 80's, and Video was the new drug. Nowadays most video rental stores are packed with boring mainstream titles, supplied by an industry of poor remakes, and "we've seen it 1000 times already" titles, but back then it was B-movie paradise, and you could choose from anything like Spaghetti Westerns, Blaxplotation, Martial Arts, and Porn, to Horror movies, and it wasn't exactly Dracula and Frankenstein that were sought after, but a new breed of explicit and violent Splatter flicks from Italy and the US.

An old censorship fanatic from the UK named Mary Whitehouse had been sent a tape of Cannibal Holocaust by the company VTC hoping to get some free promotion once she got to see the film, as she was already a well known anti Porn and Violence activist, but boy did the attempt for free promotion go way out of hand! It started a national panic in the UK among religious fanatics, parents, and anti everything activists, which spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and other European contries via a string of TV shows showing the most violent clips from some of the films causing more or less panic, and a demand to ban this "filth". The media labeled it "Video Nasties" or "Video Violence", and so a new genre was born, and the crusade for getting these films banned did quite the opposite. Sales of VCR's, and violent movies sky rocketed because of all the free promotion, and especially for children it became the new and exciting thing that we all had to see. In a matter of months police raided the Videoshops and movies were confiscated, making the demand for them even higher, but also made them very hard to get.

The ultimate goal when it came to Video for us kids was to get a hold of the Video Nasties. We had heard on TV that those films were dangerous, and that you could actually go crazy from seeing them, so we had to see them, if nothing else than to see if we'd really go nuts from watching.

I was 12 years old when I finally managed to borrow some of the Nasties from an older friend, and ran up to one of my friends who's dad had a VHS player, and as we needed that and I had Video 2000 it was sleepover time that night. My friends father understood all too well what was going on and confiscated my bag of movies which included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Death Trap (Eaten Alive), Halloween 1 & 2, The Omen, Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Shivers, and Zombie Flesh Eaters. There was no way in hell we were gonna watch those films on his VCR! It was ok that I slept over, but friend's dad took the movies and put them beside his bed, so we waited til about 1am, and while daddy was asleep we managed to sneak the bag of films out of his room and downstairs where the VCR was. So..finally we would get to experience some of the dangerous Videos, and TCM was put in first, then Death Trap, then Zombie Flesh Eaters.

We stayed up all night watching with an excitement I've never felt sooner or later from seeing any movie. then all of a sudden oops it was already 7am, we had stayed up all night, and daddy was awake coming down the stairs pretty furious to say the least, and after we had gotten some sleep he would have to give us a "good talking to"!